Tom DBA writes “Bloomberg reports on claims that the swine flu could have been accidentally made in a lab, which are now being investigated by the World Health Organization. Quoting: ‘Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu drug, said in an interview today that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said that he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus’s origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint. … Gibbs and two colleagues analyzed the publicly available sequences of hundreds of amino acids coded by each of the flu virus’s eight genes. … [The CDC’s Nancy Cox says] since researchers don’t have samples of swine flu viruses from South America and Africa, where the new strain may have evolved, those regions can’t be ruled out as natural sources for the new flu.'” Time has a related story evaluating the World Health Organization’s response to H1N1.

According to Apple, there aren’t any PCs with fast processors and big screens that work without viruses, crashes or headaches. But folks, this isn’t reality, this is advertising. In fact, this is Apple’s first jab since Microsoft took off the gloves with its Laptop Hunters series of pokes against Apple.

jamie found this visualization of air travel, which might be usable in some sort of proxy for the spread of flu virus (to choose a random application). Jer Thorp, an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada (and a former geneticist), searched Twitter for the phrase “Just landed in” and obtained lat/lon coordinates for both the indicated airport and the Twitter user’s home location, as recorded in their Twitter profile. He them produced videos of multi-hour stretches of air travel that had been latent in the Twitter information stream.

Hugh Pickens writes “A team of Army cadets spent four days at West Point last week struggling around the clock to keep a computer network operating while hackers from the National Security Agency tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The NSA made the cadets’ task more difficult by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on millions of computers around the world. The competition was a final exam for computer science and information technology majors, who competed against teams from the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine as well as the Naval Postgraduate Academy and the Air Force Institute of Technology. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools’ networks while also defending their own but only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations is allowed to take down a US network. NSA tailored its attacks to be just ‘a little too hard for the strongest undergraduate team to deal with, so that we could distinguish the strongest teams from the weaker ones.’ The winning West Point team used Linux, instead of relying on proprietary products from big-name companies like Microsoft or Sun Microsystems.”

Using pieces of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines associated with virus threats, the data was analyzed by frequency, density, and groupings. Algorithms were then developed and two commissioned artists mapped the data to the inputs of the algorithms, which then generated virtual, 3D entities.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his idea for mass adoption of anti-virus software: “If the US government did more to encourage people to keep their computers secure — by buying TV ads to publicize free private-sector anti-virus programs, or subsidizing the purchase of anti-virus software — we’d all be better off, on average. That’s not just idealistic nanny-statism, but something you can argue mathematically, to the point where even some libertarians would agree.” Read on for the rest of Bennett’s thoughts.